Lockdown: Maul

by Star Wars

  “Matching my reigning champion. As you can see—”

  “The bout that you posted indicates a completely different set of opponents. The odds that you gave on this fight have nothing to do with the Zabrak or the Aqualish. Which means that you either deliberately chose to defy the Gaming Commission regulations …” He paused. “Or you’ve been hacked.”

  “Hacked?” Sadiki chuckled. “Commissioner, I assure you—”

  “Do you see a third explanation?”

  “Please.” She glanced at Dakarai, as if he might somehow, in defiance of everything she knew about him, speak up on her behalf. “If you’ll just allow me to investigate—”

  “It’s too late for that. You’ve overstepped your bounds for the last time.” There was a portentous silence as Chlorus summoned the full weight of his authority. “The Galactic Gaming Commission is shutting you down.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “You …” Sadiki’s face didn’t change, but her neck flushed red, the color rising slowly to her hairline. “You really don’t want to start down that road with me, Dragomir.”

  “If you’re implying that I don’t have the authority,” Chlorus said, “then you’re sadly mistaken. If you think I’m bluffing, then you’re wrong about that, too. And if I were you, I would keep all your inmates in lockdown until this is sorted out.”

  “Now you’re telling me how to run my prison?”

  Chlorus glared at her. “You should be thanking me. You have far bigger problems. And if you’d made the slightest effort to listen to me earlier, none of this would have reached the crisis point.”

  “I’m telling you, the Hutts haven’t shown the faintest interest in—”

  “The Desilijic Clan has already infiltrated your prison,” the Commissioner said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “According to intelligence that I’ve just received, they’ve had their foot soldiers inside Cog Hive Seven for months in an ongoing effort to ferret out Radique. It’s uncertain how many exactly, but the data that’ve come across my desk so far seem to indicate that their presence within the prison is significant.”

  “You’re the gaming commissioner,” Sadiki said. “How is this your business?”

  “Let’s just say you need someone to watch over you.” Chlorus sighed. “I know your tendency to get in over your head.”

  Sadiki allowed herself a slow, restorative breath. In all the years she’d been here, this was as close as Chlorus had come to acknowledging the brief relationship that they had enjoyed during her early days managing the sabacc tables at the Outlander Casino and Resort on Coruscant. She’d been very young at the time, new to her position, easily swayed and even seduced by his authority. What happened between them had ended badly, with misgivings on both sides. But now was not the time or place to exhume that particular corpse and find out whether there was any life left in it.

  She forced a smile. It felt like work.

  “Dragomir, that’s very kind. Under normal circumstances I’d be flattered, but—”

  “Stop. Just—stop.” Chlorus paused, and when he spoke again, he sounded more concerned than she’d ever heard him. “Sadiki, I’ve heard all your excuses and prevarications, but at this point, if you do know anything at all about the whereabouts of this man Radique, I recommend that you share it with the Hutts straightaway. Otherwise you may have a mutiny on your hands that even you cannot control.”

  “Mutiny? You mean a riot?” Sadiki glanced over her shoulder at Dakarai, but her brother remained expressionless, his face maddeningly unreadable. She turned back to the holoscreen. “All our inmates carry electrostatic charges implanted in their hearts. I can terminate any of them with the touch of a button. If any of them were foot soldiers sent in here by the Hutts—”

  “Sadiki, I’m not talking about inmates,” Chlorus said. “I’m talking about guards.”

  She just stared at him. “I beg your pardon?”

  “How many guards does Cog Hive Seven employ at any given time?” Chlorus asked.

  “Between seventy and eighty. But we screen each one carefully, with a full background check and identity verification—”

  “All of which the Desilijic Clan could have easily forged in order to get their people inside,” the Commissioner said. His voice was grave. “Be vigilant, Sadiki. I’ll speak to you again soon.”

  Sadiki turned back to look at Dakarai again. But her brother was no longer looking at the commissioner.

  He was watching the match.

  30

  TANK

  Maul’s lungs were screaming.

  He’d already lost track of how long he’d been underwater. Time had twisted back upon itself and lost all meaning. Both his hearts were thudding faster, pounding through his entire body in an attempt to circulate any remaining air. Blackness crowded in around the edges of his vision, threatening to bury his consciousness beneath an avalanche of oxygen debt.

  When the other inmate had first swum at him, he had slammed Maul in the diaphragm, driving out the breath he’d inhaled just before going down for the last time. Maul swirled around, pulling himself down by the zip-ties that fastened his ankles, coiling down alongside the submerged bench.

  What he saw was an Aqualish swimming back toward him, cutting smoothly through the water—the one Maul hoped was Rook. He sprang up and plunged his fingers into the other inmate’s bulbous eyes. The Aqualish recoiled and disappeared—only to come at him again from behind with a violent strike to the back of his skull.

  Maul sucked in a mouthful of contaminated water and gagged, expelling it in an involuntary contraction. Around him in the near-darkness, nothing stirred. A thin sediment of silt and filth seemed to have settled across the bottom. His gaze settled on the blurry glow of lights from the other side of the cell, and he became aware of how little time he had left.

  He looked down at the bench to which his ankles were still fastened. The pressure seemed to be squeezing his chest like an enormous fist. If he weren’t bound here, if he just had one more breath of air—

  Stop it. It was his Master’s voice, unmistakable in its scorn. Your inadequacy is worse than disgraceful. It’s nauseating.

  Maul steeled himself. The cold words sobered him. If he was destined to die here, even under these humiliating circumstances—if such was the fate that the dark side had selected for him—then it would not be with the whimpering of his own weakness in his ears.

  Yanking himself down to the very floor of the cell, he flattened his body beneath the bench, groping in darkness until his numb fingertips located the rounded shape of one of the bolts holding the steel plating together. There were several such bolts, but this one felt like the loosest. Raising an elbow, he drove it down against the bolt, then lifted it up and hit the metal again until the screw loosened enough that he was able to twist it loose and pluck it free.

  Putting his mouth to the newly exposed hole, he sucked in fresh air and blew out bubbles through his nose before drawing in another deep breath, letting the oxygen replenish his bloodstream. The results were immediate. The blackness around his vision began to fade. Yet he made himself wait here beneath the bench for another moment, until he saw the vague shape of the Aqualish swimming just above him.

  Maul shot up through the water as far as the ankle restraints would allow and seized the other inmate by its tusks, snapping one of them off. The Aqualish trumpeted out a nasal shriek of surprise and pain, and Maul hammered him in the abdomen. When his opponent bent forward, he pounded Rook’s skull into the cell wall. Blood seeped from the Aqualish’s head as he rounded on Maul, cutting back through the water.

  Gone again.

  Maul squinted, scanning the depths. Where had the other inmate taken himself? Had the hatchway been left open so that Rook could come and go, attacking him at his leisure?

  He pulled himself back down under the bench, pressed his lips to the hole in the floor, and was about to inhale another breath when he felt somet
hing thick and slippery and hideously alive squirt up inside his mouth. Recoiling, Maul spat it out and saw a thin white worm floating up past his face, wiggling defiantly, its tiny mandibles working fiercely to grip hold of something. He narrowed his eyes and looked back down at the hole. More of the things were beginning to push their way up into the cell through the hole, pulsing up from below in a steady stream.

  Maul turned away. Was there any manner of foulness that this place did not specialize in? How much longer—

  Wham!

  White-hot pressure exploded against the back of his skull, leaving him dizzy and disoriented. In his peripheral vision, he was narrowly aware of the Aqualish coming back around, his body rippling effortlessly toward him, cocking back its fist again to deliver another blow. Maul fought to anchor his thoughts. With his supply of air shut down, he knew he had to finish this now.

  Slimy to touch, greasy to feel, but mix me with blood and I’ll eat through steel.

  He stuck one hand down under the bench, scraping his fingers against the thick accumulation of sticky reddish-brown gunk that had made a home for itself in the seams between the metal plates. Cupping the stuff in one palm, kneading it together, he held still and waited. He had one chance to get this right. He knew he would not have to wait long.

  The opponent made his move. As he darted toward Maul, Maul grabbed him by the tufts of hair on either side of his face and shoved the handful of toxic girder mold into the open laceration in the Aqualish’s scalp, grinding it as deeply into the wound as he could.

  The results were even more gratifying than he’d hoped. The Aqualish recoiled and began to scream, bubbles flooding out of him as he clutched at his head with both hands. The wound was already sizzling and bubbling, flecks of tissue drifting away.

  Maul seized his head and locked his arm around the Aqualish’s neck. Grabbing another handful of girder mold from under the bench, Maul reached down and smeared it into the zip-ties that bound him here. Then he pulled the Aqualish down so that the blood from his wound churned through the water to interact with the mold. The resulting catalyst attacked the Nylasteel instantly, cutting through it. All at once Maul’s legs were suddenly, shockingly free.

  Kicking loose, turning around in the water, Maul dragged the other inmate down headfirst toward the submerged floor of the cell and held him there, watching the steel plating dissolving beneath it. A ragged hole had already begun to open, widening while he watched, water siphoning down through it. Within seconds it would be sufficient for what he required.

  He and the Aqualish were sucked down together, pushed through on the current, Maul holding tight to his neck. A moment later they spilled out into an open drainage shaft. The pipe opened below them, and Maul threw the Aqualish up onto a platform overhead and sprang up alongside him into the open air. He whooped in a deep breath of air, filling his lungs, and turned to fix the other inmate with his gaze.

  “Are you Rook?”

  The Aqualish nodded and barked out a froggy, croaking “Yes.”

  “You know what this is?” Maul asked, still holding on to a handful of the girder mold that he’d brought from the cell. “And what it can do to you when it interacts with your blood?”

  The Aqualish faced him. His face was horribly disfigured from the acid, his eyes badly wounded from the puncture attack, but beneath the physical trauma there was no mistaking the disbelief in his expression.

  “This—this can’t be happening. I’m not supposed to be matched, ever. He said I was never going to have to fight.”

  “You’re going to die,” Maul told him. “Right now. Slowly. I’ll burn the rest of your face off. Unless you tell me everything.”

  “I don’t know what you’re—”

  “About Iram Radique.”

  The one called Rook made a poor show of not understanding, but it didn’t last long. Maul held the mold up to the bleeding head wound, in close enough proximity that the inmate’s flesh actually began, faintly, to sizzle. The Aqualish tried to jerk back, but Maul held him fast. When he spoke, the words came out in a scream.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “How do I get to him?”

  “You can’t! Nobody can! Even I don’t speak to him directly!”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not, I swear!”

  “Then you’re worthless to me,” Maul said, and prepared to smear the rest of the mold over Rook’s face.

  “Wait—wait! I can tell you this,” the Aqualish panted, his gills flapping as he tried vainly to salvage what remained of his composure. “The weapons—they arrive in different pieces.”

  “I already know that,” Maul said. “What happens after the gang members smuggle them in? Where do they go? How does Radique retrieve the pieces from them without being seen?”

  “The birds,” Rook said. “They collect the different components. Bring them to the shop. If you follow the clawbirds, you’ll find Radique.”

  “When does the next shipment arrive?”

  “There’s a supply ship docking tomorrow during the first watch, but that’s—that’s truly all I know.”

  “Is there anyone else between you and Radique? Another link in the chain?”

  Gaping at him, his wounded eyes darting back to the handful of mold packed into Maul’s fist, the Aqualish murmured some oath in its own native language. “Please, I cooperated. I told you everything.”

  “Answer me,” Maul said. “Who else is there?”

  Rook’s three-fingered right hand swept out, smearing something on the wet surface of the pipe. Maul looked at it. It was a circle.

  “What does that mean?” he growled.

  The Aqualish made a wet, shuddering noise. “It’s all I know. Don’t kill me. Don’t—”

  “You were dead when you were matched with me,” Maul said. “But I will give my word to you. It will be quick.”

  He took hold of Rook’s head with both hands and cracked the thing’s neck in a single, instantaneous jerk. The Aqualish shuddered and fell motionless, slipping backward and toppling from view.

  31

  CLARITY

  Midnight.

  The morgue.

  Maul had found his way down here after the last fight. No one had tried to engage him along the way. Something had changed in the handful of hours since he’d killed Rook—a fundamental shift in the polarity of genpop itself. Now the other inmates, including the gang members and even the guards, stayed away from him completely. Not so much out of fear or respect as self-preservation, the way a herd of nonsentient life-forms will keep their distance from one carrying a lethal infection. It was as if they sensed what Maul had done and how he’d marked himself for death.

  Not that he cared. If it got him closer to Radique, nothing else mattered.

  Now he knelt before the image on the holoprojector, lowering his head before the face of his Master.

  “My Lord, I have continued to endeavor—”

  “Enough.” Sidious cut him off midsentence, his tone barbed with thorns of irritation. “Why do you continue to try my patience, my apprentice? Why do you persist in humiliating yourself while making me wait for answers that you should have provided days ago?”

  Maul narrowed his eyes in an attempt to see more clearly. Through the makeshift holoprojector, Sidious was staring down at him from what felt like miles above, distant yet formidable, a weight that he could not lift. The question, apparently, was not rhetorical.

  “I am trying, Master. The path is difficult.”

  “You dare to make excuses?” Sidious’s voice roared in his head. “After the years I have spent training you? Honing your skills, preparing you for every eventuality, training you in the ways of survival, endurance, and attack? How long have you begged for an opportunity to play some role in the Grand Plan?”

  “And I am grateful,” Maul told him. “My loyalty to you is beyond question, pledged with my very life’s blood—”

  “Declarations of loyalty are worthless wit
hout victory.” Cruelty dripped from Sidious’s words. “Abstractions do not interest me at this point. Time is short. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, my Master.”

  “I wonder if you do. Or if the time has come for me to find another apprentice more deserving of the honor.”

  Maul stiffened and rose. “No!”

  “Then prove that you are worthy. Stop wasting my time with empty pledges of fidelity and complete the mission that you have been charged with.”

  “Master, if I were only allowed to call upon the power of the dark side—”

  The thought snapped off, unfinished. Maul felt an invisible hand clamp down over his throat, gripping the cartilage and cutting off the airway. Stumbling, he dropped back to his knees, to the coldness of the morgue floor.

  “You have been given everything you need and more. You enjoy untold physical advantages that these inferior combatants could only dream of. And you know very well the consequences of revealing your true abilities in the dark side, especially at this late stage. Many are watching. You are not the only one inside Cog Hive Seven searching for Radique.”

  “Yes, my Master.”

  “Do not make me wait any longer. Find him now and make the appropriate arrangements.”

  Maul managed a single, strangled nod of compliance, and at once the pressure disappeared. As suddenly as it had materialized, the holoprojector image flickered out, and the incorporeal vision of Sidious was gone, devoured by the void from which it had sprung.

  Maul fell to the floor and dropped his head, pressing his brow down against cold steel. Never had he experienced such urgency from the Dark Lord, such profound and overwhelming sense of purpose, driven by … what? Was there something else worrying his Master, some danger to Lord Sidious himself that he had not shared with Maul? The idea made him uneasy, as it always did.

  He kept his head down, awaiting answers that would not come. He stayed that way for a long time as the tension gathered in his core muscles, clenching his fists, tightening his jaw, drawing everything rigid. Red rage was already beginning to boil up from inside him. And, as always, he welcomed it, even as he drew clean breaths of air into his lungs. In the moments when everything else betrayed him, the rage was there, a lone companion.